"I suppose it looks like me," she said, doubtfully, "but then, it isn't a portrait, of course. I—I don't think I look just like that. Sometimes he stands in front of me for the longest time and glares, looking more and more disappointed, and all at once he says I've got a Sphynx of a face or a deuce of a mouth, or something just as complimentary. Then he turns to the picture again and changes something, with merely a touch of one of those big brushes, and plasters on another dab of paint and moves off to look at it. After this, he says it's much better, or declares he's spoiled everything, and he lights his pipe and goes to work again. Sometimes he wears the expression of a bulldog worrying a bone, and a minute later he'll be just as nice as nice can be. He's a strange man."
"He certainly is," I assented. "At any rate, I am glad that your experience with him, on the whole, has not proved a disagreeable one."
"Indeed, sometimes I have rather enjoyed it. Yesterday, I didn't. He began, à propos of nothing, to tell me about one of your books, and said that your idea about a girl called Laura was so silly he had no patience with you, because you had idealized her until it was rather a caricature than a portrait, and you didn't know any more about women than the baby did. So, of course, I got angry at him and he looked at me, with a smile that was half a sneer, and told me to keep on looking just like that. It seems that I had just the expression he wanted to bring out. When you look too long at the baby,' he said, 'you get the likeness of a girl who's been scolded at table and is going to cry into the soup. I thought I'd wake you up!' I was ever so provoked, and he painted right along without minding me in the least. When he was through, he put on his most polite air and told me that all he had said about that Laura was nonsense, and that she was just a fool girl like any other. As for the picture, he said it would make some fellows sit up and take notice. He appeared to be intensely pleased with it and thanked me for being so patient with him."
"I am not surprised," I told her. "When our good little friend, Dr. Porter, who is the best-hearted chap you'll meet in a long day's journey, becomes very interested in some dreadful malady and wants to make experiments, I am sure he considers guinea-pigs and rats in the light of mere material. Gordon will not have the slightest compunction about vivisecting a model, if it suits his purpose."
"But he can be ever so kind. He very often is," declared Frances. "On the very first day he told me not to allow myself to get overtired, and he's kept on asking me ever since, if I didn't want to take a rest. Sometimes he made me stop, when I could very well have kept on."
Frieda appeared, coming around the corner under full steam, and we got in the car and went off to the movies. The services of Eulalie had been obtained, to mind the baby for a couple of hours. She likes to do it, and it gives her an opportunity to go into my room and rummage in my bureau drawers, where she hunts for missing buttons with the eagerness of a terrier looking for rats.
When we returned, satiated with picturesque tragedy and second-rate vaudeville, Frances, as usual, flew upstairs, obsessed with the idea that obviously grease-painted and false-whiskered villains such as we had seen on the screen must have penetrated the citadel and stolen her baby. Frieda had left us at the door, and I climbed up in more leisurely fashion, meeting Eulalie on the stairs, loaded with my soiled linen, who bade me good evening, pleasantly.
Frances was waiting for me on her door-sill.
"Paul is all right. Nothing has happened," she confided to me. "Good night, Mr. Cole, and thank you ever so much."
She smiled at me, and I was pleased that I had been able to divert her thoughts for a few moments. How glad I should be if I could render more permanent that little look of happiness she showed for an instant!